Cuba agrees to resume talks with US on migration

Cuba has agreed to resume talks with the United States on migration and direct mail, a US official said on Sunday, as a US-Cuban thaw gathers pace under President Barack Obama's administration.

9:38PM BST 31 May 2009

The announcement came as the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, prepared to attend Tuesday's Organisation of American States (OAS) general assembly in Honduras, where Washington and its southern neighbours have been caught in a row over the pace of normalisation with Cuba.

The Cuban government informed Washington on Saturday that it "would like to resume migration talks.... (and) engage in talks on direct mail service," the senior State Department official told reporters on the condition of anonymity.

"We and the Cubans have to determine a mutually convenient place and time," he added.

The official said the Cubans "also indicated they would like to explore areas of additional dialogue," such as in counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, hurricane and disaster preparedness response.

US officials said May 23 that the Obama administration had proposed to resume the discussions on migration issues, which had been conducted every two years until they were suspended in 2003 by former President George W Bush.

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It was also Washington that recently proposed to resume direct mail, the official said, adding mail has for years, if not decades, been sent between the United States and Cuba through a third country.

The official called the moves a "very positive development and step forward" as the Obama administration pursues engagement with Cuba, which has been under a decades-old US embargo.

He said diplomatic notes were handed to US officials by Jorge Bolanos, the head of the Cuban interests section in Washington.

Cuba has a long-standing interest in seeing migration dialogue progress. The Caribbean nation of more than 11 million is bothered by embarrassing illegal emigration by Cubans across the shark-infested Florida Straits.

Havana, the Americas' only one-party communist regime, has long argued the United States should increase its number of standard legal immigration visas for Cubans.

Since coming to office in January, the Obama administration has called past US policy a failure and moved to repair ties with Cuban President Raul Castro, who officially took over the reins from older brother Fidel last year.

In April, Mr Obama lifted travel and money transfer restrictions on Cuban-Americans with relatives in Cuba.

When asked if the announcement would affect the OAS meeting on Tuesday in San Pedro Sula, the official said "it is hoped that this will be understood in the region in a positive way".

US officials earlier declined to even rule out the possibility of Mrs Clinton skipping the OAS meeting altogether if negotiators fail to agree on terms for bringing Cuba back within the 35-member organisation's fold.

The United States wants Cuba to free political prisoners and respect political freedoms for it to participate fully in the OAS, saying Havana should be held to the democratic principles enshrined in the 2001 OAS charter.